A new report claiming to have pieced together several components for the third-generation iPad appears to show that Apple has planned few changes to the design of its popular tablet.

MIC Gadget posted on Sunday hands-on footage with an alleged front glass panel, rear shell and some internal parts to the next-generation iPad, which is expected to be unveiled at an Apple media event later this week.

The report claimed the purported next-gen iPad components debunk highly speculative rumors that Apple will remove the home button from the device. Though some had pointed to Apple's invitation to this week's event as evidence of the arrival of an iPad without a home button, others have claimed that the image simply showed an iPad in landscape mode.

Alleged next-gen iPad cases purchased in Shenzhen, China were found to fit the purported "iPad 3" rear shell, which reportedly has more tapered edges than the iPad 2, perfectly. According to the publication, case manufacturers have already begun shipping thousands of such cases to the U.S. this past week. The third-generation tablet is expected to be slightly thicker than its predecessor.

Though various reports have suggested that Apple will introduce an LTE iPad at its media event on March 7, the publication's sources assert that the company is not yet ready to enter the LTE market. According to the report, Apple's decision to hold off on 4G data will result in the release of the third-generation iPad with the same storage options and pricing as the iPad 2. Author Steve Lo further speculated that LTE-compatible Qualcomm chipsets will "most likely" make their way into the fourth-generation iPad.

The third-generation iPad is expected to have a high-definition Retina Display with four times as many pixels as the iPad 2. The device will also likely sport an upgraded processor, though there is some disagreement whether the new chip will be a quad-core or dual-core model.

Sunday's report also affirmed expectations that Apple will announce an update to its Apple TV set-top box this week. The new device would reportedly feature an A5X processor employing "lower nanometer manufacturing" to run cooler and more energy efficient. Tipsters went on to claim that a new "one more thing" item, codenamed B28, could make an appearance at Wednesday's event and may have something to do with Apple's Siri voice assistant.

Inventory of the current-generation Apple TV appears to have dried up for several different resellers even as talk of an imminent update has picked up.

I've always been sceptical of 4G being in the iPad 3. Seems more likely to go into the next iPhone first. Of course, they can release a 4G model whenever they want, since it would be a separate model and would only release in some regions (it makes no sense selling 4G products in countries that don't have 4G yet). It's plausible that they'd release 4G versions along with the next iPhone (which would also come in 3G and 4G flavours).

Apple patented the horizontal pin connection, I really hope they use it because I think an iPad would be better if it was in landscape mode since most media is used on landscape. Maybe that's why the invitation didn't have a home button, it may be on the other side now! Let's hope.

The more information that comes out, the more I'm tempted to hold off.

A high Res display and Siri are great, but Apple should keep pushing the envelope. "Good enough" is how you go from market leader to an also ran. They have the lead in tablet computing - padding their pockets for year by making a device that isn't cutting edge will harm the company.

LTE is pretty common in the Android world, the iPad really needs to have it. It's fine that Apple doesn't want to include an SD slot, but make a 128GB model available then. I know processor speed isn't everything, but if Android makers are using quad cores, then make sure that the processor and graphics are powerful enough to drive the Retina display. The rumors are saying that the cameras are better, but they should at least be to the iPhone 4 level.

I've always been sceptical of 4G being in the iPad 3. Seems more likely to go into the next iPhone first. Of course, they can release a 4G model whenever they want, since it would be a separate model and would only release in some regions (it makes no sense selling 4G products in countries that don't have 4G yet). It's plausible that they'd release 4G versions along with the next iPhone (which would also come in 3G and 4G flavours).

I'm skeptical, too, but I can certainly make a case for LTE showing up in the iPad first. I think the biggest factor to consider as to why they they would add this feature in the iPad before the iPhone is whether they think it's more important to do a power play to close off the iPad (née tablet) market to anyone trying to make a significant impact.

Off topic: AT&T is looking to get remaining customers off '2G' devices so they can reassign that GSM bandwidth to LTE. They are apparently starting in NYC where it surely is needed. I look forward to that.

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Since it's going to be thicker, I'm kind of worried it'll be heavier.

Apple has released plenty of iOS-based iDevices that were smaller and yet heavier than their predecessors so I think it's possible, especially when considering the potential need for a larger battery for the new display.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ewan

Apple patented the horizontal pin connection, I really hope they use it because I think an iPad would be better if it was in landscape mode since most media is used on landscape. Maybe that's why the invitation didn't have a home button, it may be on the other side now! Let's hope.

I don't see that happening.

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Originally Posted by Michael Scrip

Remember all the people who said the iPhone 4S wasn't a big enough upgrade?

"We upgraded everything but the casing and the nomenclature."
"Not good enough!"

This bot has been removed from circulation due to a malfunctioning morality chip.

Remember all the people who said the iPhone 4S wasn't a big enough upgrade?

The market certainly didn't think so. The same will be true with the next iPad.

When people want "an iPhone" or "an iPad" they will buy one... whatever it's called.

Just about everyone uses a mobile phone now. If it's time to buy a new one, people are going to buy whatever iPhone they can get.

Tablets are another matter - not many people NEED a tablet. They're more like a nice-to-have. Apple has to convince people to make that purchase, and a modest upgrade won't look so good when the competition is trying to do all they can to steal Apple's market share.

Hopefully Apple will continue to innovate, and not decide to make this year's iPad a small upgrade with larger margins.

It's fine that Apple doesn't want to include an SD slot, but make a 128GB model available then.

Only $200 and 10MBps¡ They won't add an SD card. Heck, even on-board NAND needs to be faster. Don't expect 128Gb until the price comes down and the double density chips have good enough speed and write cycles. So far I haven't seen any of that.

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I know processor speed isn't everything, but if Android makers are using quad cores, then make sure that the processor and graphics are powerful enough to drive the Retina display.

How are those two things part of the same sentence? Why would you presume that Apple might not use HW that can drive the HiDPI display? They have yet to be beat by any other handset or tablet maker when it comes to the smoothness of the UI. The user experience is kind of their forte.

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The rumors are saying that the cameras are better, but they should at least be to the iPhone 4 level.

Maybe it'll be the same Sony component but I don't see why it should be. It's a camera on a tablet after all. Is there even a flash hole on those leaked cases? I didn't notice one.

This bot has been removed from circulation due to a malfunctioning morality chip.

Just about everyone uses a mobile phone now. If it's time to buy a new one, people are going to buy whatever iPhone they can get.

Tablets are another matter - not many people NEED a tablet. They're more like a nice-to-have. Apple has to convince people to make that purchase, and a modest upgrade won't look so good when the competition is trying to do all they can to steal Apple's market share.

Hopefully Apple will continue to innovate, and not decide to make this year's iPad a small upgrade with larger margins.

You have the concept correct but the result backwards. It's the subsidized handset market that makes it easy for people to go for an Android phone over an iPhone but with tablets their is no subsidy so the decision requires the buyer to think about their purchase more. The ecosystem matters. This is why Apple owns the tablet market in 2 years time despite it existing for 3 decades or only since 2010, depending on your tilt. If they release a HiDPI display at the same price points I think they will close have made it into an iPod-esque domination in record time.

This bot has been removed from circulation due to a malfunctioning morality chip.

I doubt it will feature a quad core processor, 128 GB or LTE though. Seems like too much at once.

Quad-core seems more likely but as we're seeing from Qualcomm's Krait dual-core is better for both performance and power savings when you use the more advanced architecture. I think Krait is about as unique from Cortex-A9/A15 as Apple's A5 is from Cortex-A9 so it's possible they could employe the same tactics. Still, I'd wager on quad-core.

This bot has been removed from circulation due to a malfunctioning morality chip.

Quad-core seems more likely but as we're seeing from Qualcomm's Krait dual-core is better for performance and power savings when you use more advanced architecture. I think Krait is about as unique from Cortex-A9/A15 as Apple's A5 is from Cortex-A9 so it's possible they could employed the same tactics. Still, I'd wager on quad-core.

Quad core is not enough! I need 16 cores in my tablet so I can feel superior to all of the other "big spec" tablets out there. Propping up one's self-esteem is the ONLY reason to own hardware.

Well, that and making sure to buy the new model if it gets a new enclosure or whining about the new model if it doesn't get a new enclosure, because you need others to see that you have the newest model, too.

Well, that and making sure to buy the new model if it gets a new enclosure or whining about the new model if it doesn't get a new enclosure, because you need others to see that you have the newest model, too.

I wonder if some people think that by always complaining people will see them as intelligent and/or analytical. I wonder how that is working out for them.

This bot has been removed from circulation due to a malfunctioning morality chip.

Just about everyone uses a mobile phone now. If it's time to buy a new one, people are going to buy whatever iPhone they can get.

Tablets are another matter - not many people NEED a tablet. They're more like a nice-to-have. Apple has to convince people to make that purchase, and a modest upgrade won't look so good when the competition is trying to do all they can to steal Apple's market share.

Hopefully Apple will continue to innovate, and not decide to make this year's iPad a small upgrade with larger margins.

There is a huge untapped market of non-iPad users. That's who Apple is targeting too... not just current iPad users.

If the next iPad is simply a "modest" upgrade to the current iPad... it's still wonderful to a person who doesn't have an iPad already.

This happens all the time in the tech industry. HP and Dell keep pumping out new laptops year after year. But you're not expected to buy every single one.

Same for point-n-shoot cameras. Canon launches 10 new cameras a year. They don't do that for the person who just bought a camera last year... it's for everyone else who might need a new camera at the moment.

My prediction: I bet most iPads sold this year go to first-time owners. They won't complain that it's just a "modest" upgrade over the previous model...

I think we get caught up in the notion that Apple fans buy each and every Apple product that is released.

There's a whole other market of potential customers out there. Somebody is ready to buy at any given time.

The more information that comes out, the more I'm tempted to hold off.

A high Res display and Siri are great, but Apple should keep pushing the envelope. "Good enough" is how you go from market leader to an also ran. They have the lead in tablet computing - padding their pockets for year by making a device that isn't cutting edge will harm the company.

LTE is pretty common in the Android world, the iPad really needs to have it. It's fine that Apple doesn't want to include an SD slot, but make a 128GB model available then. I know processor speed isn't everything, but if Android makers are using quad cores, then make sure that the processor and graphics are powerful enough to drive the Retina display. The rumors are saying that the cameras are better, but they should at least be to the iPhone 4 level.

Hopefully we'll all be pleasantly surprised on Wednesday.

You are suggesting they change all these things because of the competition from Android, but there actually is no competition from Android.

In other words you are arguing that the hugely successful iPad design be altered to be more in line with the hugely unsuccessfull designs of their would-be competitors.

A new report claiming to have pieced together several components for the third-generation iPad appears to show that Apple has planned few changes to the design of its popular tablet.

One sure sign of great design is that it's difficult to improve. Brilliant engineering can often be recognized by the way in which successive iterations become ever more subtle, because tiny, evolutionary changes are all that can be made without reducing the quality of the end result. Separated from its popular redefinition as a dominance game played by the ignorant via conspicuous consumption, taste is really nothing more than sensitivity… the capacity for subtle perception.

Because concepts like taste and elegance have historically been among the trappings of oppression and we fancy ourselves a democracy, we as a culture now suspect the very words. It's time to remember that "refinement" is nothing more than the process of discarding what isn't intrinsic until only the real thing remains. It's figuratively and literally the inverse of how we make crap. Instead of elegance, we tastelessly base our economy, endeavors, and lives on false assumptions and inevitably destroy what we've created in hopes of squeezing another buck out of it. Advertising is a great example of this, being nothing more than propaganda designed to dupe people into valuing the "new and improved," never more so than when it's neither. You can no more advertise elegance than you can fight for peace.

Once we all decided the purpose of life was to Get Rich, it was inevitable that destructive vulgarity would not only be accepted and admired, but the only thing we aspire to. It's not about what bad you carry or what fork you use: vulgarity results from a lack of integrity, first in ourselves, and then (inevitably) in everything we touch. If we rewrite "The Emperor's New Clothes" for our time, its the Emperor who's wise and his subjects who're fools. The moral is that, having been subjected to exacting design standards for thousands of years, the human body is unlikely to be improved by slapping this season's Versace on it. Boredom, in particular, is almost entirely a statement about the inability of the bored to pay attention. It's both an aesthetic and a moral failing – the two are inextricable.

Meanwhile, back at the nerd ranch, tech journalism remains at the forefront of a largely unexamined and completely fallacious assumption built into capitalism: that change itself is good. Conflating elegant design with profitability is a mistake when our economy guarantees that they're antithetical far more often than not. Personal electronics have become the physical equivalent of stockbrokers churning their clients: making changes to portfolios which benefit only the broker. So long as the primary goal is to profit by creating change, an exploding car will always be preferable to a gorgeous, reliable, efficient, and safe one. Of course we love to blow tihs up, don't we… So long as its other peoples' tihs.

Consider that if the last version of anything met a real need in an extraordinarily effective way, why should the next version be significantly different? Have our needs already really changed so much so quickly, or are we just bored, which is to say, not paying attention?

I'm just curious why the design would drive the naming convention of the device. So no matter what's changed on the inside, no matter what software changes there are, if this iPad looks like th iPad 2 we have to call it iPad 2S instead of iPad 3?

You have the concept correct but the result backwards. It's the subsidized handset market that makes it easy for people to go for an Android phone over an iPhone but with tablets their is no subsidy so the decision requires the buyer to think about their purchase more. The ecosystem matters. This is why Apple owns the tablet market in 2 years time despite it existing for 3 decades or only since 2010, depending on your tilt. If they release a HiDPI display at the same price points I think they will close have made it into an iPod-esque domination in record time.

I think that I have it right - A tablet is something that you need to be motivated to buy. An iPhone is a phone - hundreds of millions of people have them. Apple is still the most hip brand, so people will buy an iPhone without really even understanding why it's different than Android.

An iPad might be cool, but the market is no where near what the phone market is. And subsidized pricing makes it even cheaper (up front) for someone to own an iPhone.

The guy is a bit douche and doesn't seem to understand some basic stuff about the iPad but it does showcase Win8 well. The UI is very, very fast and smooth. After what we've seen with Android, WebOS, and PlayBook OS it's amazingly impressive.

I really like the way they did the split screens for multiple apps on that widescreen display. I also like way Charm Bar in on the right side of the screen; I hope Apple adopts this for the Notification Bar on the iPad. It makes sense to be on top for the iPhone, but on the iPad it's harder to get to.

I do wonder why they kept it plugged in the whole time. That doesn't give me hope that it runs well on ARM. Is that an ARM or Intel-based tablet?

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Originally Posted by starbird

Didn't Verizon just state that a whopping FIVE percent of their customers use 4G? Yeah, definitely a must have...

Look at where the puck is going. By year's end the '4G' uptake should be high, especially if Apple releases a '4G' capable iPhone. The 3rd gen LTE tech certainly looks to make it feasible for the 6th gen iPhone.

This bot has been removed from circulation due to a malfunctioning morality chip.

I'm just curious why the design would drive the naming convention of the device. So no matter what's changed on the inside, no matter what software changes there are, if this iPad looks like th iPad 2 we have to call it iPad 2S instead of iPad 3?

Apple does seem to change the device name with major exterior changes (3G-3GS, 4->4S).